U. S. Policy and Mass Illusions

...He was certain that Russia was not "imperialist" and that Britain was...

...Hitler did not proclaim himself Fuehrer...

...For in that second war Sir Winston Churchill had urged upon the United States the necessity of a strategy such that at the end of the war the Western Powers would be able to check Russian expansion westward...

...In the Second World War, when Russia again became the ally of the West, these "axioms" of progressivism were to affect profoundly the military strategy of the West...

...On the contrary, it marked the beginning of the greatest century that Britain has known, a century of world power used on the whole for the promotion of democracy and freedom in every quarter of the globe...

...The killing was limited...

...That itself illustrates a grave and mischievous nationalist fallacy...

...Among his score of other books are The Story of Money (1929), Preface to Peace (1935) and Let the People Know (1943...

...Progressives had employed these terms long before the Bolshevik Revolution, so that multitudes everywhere were conditioned to respond to the slogans...

...The world outside Germany has suffered quantitatively more than Germany from the Hitler episode, or, more properly, from the failure to learn the lesson of that episode...

...weakened by the hemorrhages in Indo-China, with threat of similar blood-letting in North Africa...

...Napoleon, too, hated while he admired the English and would have loved to see them brought low...

...The Near and Middle East present conditions favorable to Communist expansion...

...Under her present brand-new constitution, following so many previous ones, political conditions are such that the French nation, even in times of dire crisis, is unable for weeks to agree upon any government at all...

...However indispensable a constitution may be, it cannot work automatically...

...The African peoples are beginning to see in Communism a moral and in Russia a material instrument of redress for all that the African has suffered at the hands of the whites throughout the ages, a temper which Malanism in South Africa is rendering implacable...

...They wanted to make of their votes an instrument of emotional release, some release of the passion of retaliation which the defeat of a militarily vain people had provoked...

...For a brief period the plan worked, as the Brest-Litovsk Treaty indicates...

...Not at all...

...unable, indeed, at times to maintain a Government at all...

...It was a model in almost every respect...

...How can recognition of the danger of these erratic political emotions serve us as a guide in making the practical decisions in, say, Korea or Kenya or Persia or Egypt or Guiana...

...It can only come by effort, vigilance, discipline...

...This they did mainly by the hypnotic power of certain words, slogans, incantations: "Democracy," "People's Governments," "People's Courts," "People's Police," "Liquidation of the Capitalist Imperialists," "Socialism...

...He expressed the view, very widely held at the time, that once Germany was defeated, the main danger to peace and British security would be removed...

...Pestilences —plagues, cholera, Black Death—can sweep over the earth like a tempest...

...So let us look at what we have willed in two World Wars and the means we have adopted for the attainment of the ends so willed...

...The ideas now proving so explosive and so disastrous to the real welfare of the people in the Near and Far East are ideas taken almost entirely from the West, particularly from British and American radicals and progressives...

...As a result she is now the arbiter of the fate of Europe...

...some survived...

...they are even more in the issues which arise between the parties and groups within each nation...

...Good health, effective response to the instinct to survive, has none of this contagious quality...

...The opposing cause or doctrine, the validity of which has on the whole been proven by the event—the event being the Christian civilization of the West—and has given during some centuries results increasingly good, has, far from showing expansion, shown contraction and retreat all along the line...

...The new and undeniable hellfire of the atomic bomb may not prove of much greater worth than the old hellfire as a deterrent to folly and ferocity...

...The error of the saner element of the German population was a refusal, when Hitler first appeared on the horizon, to believe that the farrago of nonsense which he talked could ever capture "the sound and sensible German people...

...The event has answered the pro-consul...

...No man can make himself master of a great nation and then of half a world merely by going into the street and shouting: "I am master...

...The great fact that orthodox and heretic can live together in peace proves that deep fanatical hatreds for those who have the insufferable impudence to disagree with us are no necessary part of human nature...

...the situation everywhere in Africa unstable...

...that they come from harboring certain ideas which can be changed for the better, mistaken intellectual assumptions which can be rectified...

...For, if she becomes either the ally or the satellite of Russia, so that her industry and technology are made available as the instrument of Russo-Chinese Communism, then the West can no longer be defended...

...Whether we can now' prevent the Communist-cum-atomic pestilence, no one can tell...

...We cannot know, and it may serve little purpose to believe it...

...The First World War was to be, you remember, the war that would end war and make the world safe for democracy...

...There resulted a military strategy on the part of the Western Allies which left Russia at the end of the war in a position to do what she has done: establish Communist Governments in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria—then the greatest conquest of all, China, with prospects of extending the conquest to Indo-China, Indonesia and Burma, thereby encircling India...

...In the interwar years, such propositions as "Capitalism is the cause of war" had become almost axioms of political discussion, far beyond the confines of Communist parties...

...But the coming of Hitler, unlike the coming of Napoleon, was in its final result to mean for Britain a grave reduction of her power and, by that fact, an increase in the forces of lawless violence, disorder and chaos, alike in Europe, Asia and Africa...

...A dozen scientists, expert in the production of these weapons, tell us bluntly that, if used by both sides (and they would be used by both if by one), atomic weapons in a world war would mean the extinction of much of mankind...

...His defeat did not bring Britain low, did not mark her decline...

...It is vital to recall all this because it indicates that the forces which led to two world wars and to the defeat of the purposes for which they were fought do not arise from conflicts of material interest or of national advantage, but from mass emotions like those which for centuries marked the religious wars, most revolutionary terrors and purges, most nationalist conflicts and most partisan conflicts within nations...

...We are embarrassed now to find that there are pacifist parties in Germany taking our past admonitions on the wickedness of German militarism a bit too literally...

...As to Britain, Hitler has succeeded where Napoleon failed...

...Although Sir Norman Angell has been a New Leader contributor for many years, this represents his first article for us since August 1952...

...A doctrine of sheer hopelessness...

...The Weimar Constitution had all the virtues which German erudition could give it...

...A France racked by paralyzing strikes, headed for still further inflation, her Government unable to enforce the tax policy which the crisis demands...

...Born in Holbeach, England, Sir Norman first came to the United States in 1891 and has since visited here on numerous occasions...

...One of the most brilliant of the younger Cambridge scientists foresees the possibility of man's complete disappearance from the earth...

...Proclaims himself master" is, of course, mere manner of speech...

...Sir Norman, of course, is the author of The Great Illusion, first published in 1908 and since then reprinted and translated into 20 languages...

...Obey me...

...A year or two before the 1914 war, a great British proconsul, discussing the general problem of peace as he saw it, wrote: "The cause of war is Germans...

...The forces which destroyed the Weimar Republic were regarded by most non-Germans as concerning only Germany...

...Yet, without a degree of stability in French government, which means a degree of stability and reasonableness in French public opinion, there can be no effective defense of the West...

...The electorate did not see the end result of what they were doing because they had been persuaded to "think with their blood," to act from instinct undirected by any rational estimate of what the cost of indulgence would be...

...He was so proclaimed by the German "people," as the result of a number of electioneering steps, each step leading to others which those who took the early steps did not foresee...

...Neither Britain nor the United States is free from the germs of the sickness, as the wildcat strikes and Bevanite anti-Americanism in Britain and the increasing signs of returning isolationism —accelerated by McCarthyism—in the United States disturbingly indicate...

...Then into this society so governed there comes an uneducated, neurotic, hate-proclaiming Austrian, of obscure birth, vulgar speech and demeanor, without family influence, without arms...

...that of the Near East complicated by the successive military coups in Egypt and Iran—these are but examples of the forces of disintegration within nations which add to the difficulty of common action by Western Governments...

...When men believed deeply and sincerely in the reality of hellfire, the belief did not secure a very high level either of conduct or of wisdom, even when death was round the corner, as in the great plagues...

...If we have managed to give the East those ideas in their most dangerous form, is it quite impossible to transmit, by some educational means or other, the corrections which experience has proved so necessary...

...France—France of the Enlightenment—does not seem to have been rendered more capable of stable constitutional government by her experience of living under the rule of Hitler...

...Documents alone will not suffice...

...The one fact about the older form of religious war which should now most concern us and encourage us is that it has come to an end, at least so far as the West is concerned...

...U. S. Policy and Mass Illusions Fragments of ideology which have affected mass emotions cripple our policy By Norman Angell The differences which block the development of a more unified Western policy are not only those which arise between governments...

...The destructive passions we now witness at work are not new...

...To make such rectification in a whole mass of assumptions about democracy and nationalism, still current and often dominant, is the condition sine qua non of a successful foreign policy or a workable international constitution...

...that such passions, unlike the passions which arise from hunger or sex, have no physiological basis but are the outcome of a way of thought...

...But the old wars differed from the new in one vital respect and carried a lesson we must now learn...

...Germany has been defeated, utterly and completely, not once but twice...

...President Roosevelt, however, as we now know, would have none of it...

...To that end we proposed to render Germany militarily impotent, an achievement which would necessarily increase, automatically, the relative power of Russia...

...In any case, our situation as victors is that, having fought two devastating wars to destroy the power of Germany, we now recognize that her weakness can be a greater source of danger than her strength, and are now engaged in trying to persuade Germany to increase her military strength in order to take her part in resisting the westward advance of Russia—an advance which both the wars we fought served to promote...

...To mark its complete annihilation, he proclaims himself for life the Master of the Master Race...

...And that might happen, not because the German people as a whole willed it, but because the working of democracy in Germany might encounter the same difficulties as those revealed by its working in France: the electoral complexities of a multi-party state giving a veto power to minority parties, so that no single one can form a government to carry out a given policy, but any single one can prevent any other party from doing it...

...And just as Britain, which only yesterday clamored for German disarmament and now demands a German rearmament opposed by sections of the Germans themselves, so the America which yesterday imposed a Japanese constitution forbidding an army now demands a Japanese rearmament opposed by the Japanese Prime Minister himself...

...To forestall this, the German Government, during the course of the war, shipped a small group of revolutionaries into Russia in the hope that that country, not Germany, would be rendered militarily helpless...

...and tears that model, scientific, democratic constitution into little bits...

...But the fanaticisms of our day have very different weapons...

...We do know that if it is to be prevented there must be effort and understanding...

...Although those older wars of religion and accompanying massacres were marked by deep hatreds and murderous passions, the instruments used in them were, relatively, very primitive...

...For' his lifelong fight against war and militarism, he was knighted in 1931 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933...

...Underlying it all is that monstrous paradox which has marked the spread this last half century of the ideas which determine the policy of nations and character of human society...

...Like all leaders, he was made by his followers...

...It would seem to indicate that the mind of man is subject to a phenomenon analogous to that affecting his body: Disease is catching, good health is not...

...They were present in monstrous degree in the older wars of religion as they are in the new—for what we now see are the passions of religious fanaticism attaching themselves mainly to rival nationalisms and rival doctrines of the class struggle...

...Its effectiveness will depend on the judgment of those who operate it and live under it, on the basic assumptions which guide their day-to-day political decisions...

...But the imported revolutionaries were able to do a great deal more than destroy the parliamentary government which they had found in Russia...

...Hitler's part was to contribute an uncanny skill in arousing the meaner and baser forces of the human spirit, the more evil side of nationalism...

...They were able to bring the whole country under a Communist regime and then establish Communist parties in every country on earth...

...All that then would happen would be for the ambulance to come along and take him to the asylum...

...A doctrine, or body of social and political theory, proved by the event to be fallacious and its fruits mainly evil, has captured the wills, if not the conscious minds, of more than half mankind and has already been made the basis of government over nearly half the earth...

...and that, therefore, the increase of Russian power would prove less dangerous to the free world than any increase or even maintenance of British power—a view of the nature of "British imperialism" inherent not only in the progressive doctrines of the inter-war years but in the American folklore of nearly two centuries...